Please don’t romanticize mental anguish. I know many people who think to be an artist means you have to suffer. It’s not only an incorrect assumption—there are comedians who had happy upbringings, I swear—but encouraging suffering will only hurt them and the people who care about them. Artists who struggle with mental illness, trauma, disease, addiction (often the latter is a way of self-medicating to ameliorate or cope with the first three) do not want or welcome it. I don’t know if I’d consider myself an artist, but speaking as someone who sometimes makes stuff, I can say that my best work
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